Issue 3:2 | Poetry | Jim Minick
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Five
Poems by Jim Minick
Hips
For
Sarah
All day I
look at hips,
the rolling
swales of marbled mountains,
the sleek
slopes of burnished hills,
landscapes
I cannot visit,
nor want
to.
But at
night, I am home
in the
smooth curve of your roundness,
the hollows
and scented crevices,
the tender
peaks I touch
with lips,
tasting the sweetness
of that
hidden spring, familiar
yet always
a mystery.
Flight
Over Big Branch
She kites
her dreams
in a place
full of wind
where she
circles the sycamore
and
whistles to her kin.
Over Big
Branch
she dances
with darters,
shadows
swirl in currents,
snails
dizzy on spirals.
Then she
kettles a draft,
sifts light
with her tail,
winds up
the spine
of wind to
sail
to the high
knoll where
jimson weed
blooms white,
pollen
drifts in breezes--
tiny
meteorites.
Sycamore
on Big Branch
White arms
cradle the moon,
cup Mars
and Venus,
and on
windy nights, rock the stars.
At dawn,
the osprey launches,
the
white-faced fish hawk
reeling in
the sun.
By day, the
white arms wave in
nuthatch
and redstart, nestle young
on ribbons
of wood, limber and leafed.
Each veined
leaf, ridged
and
valleyed, is a map
of the face
of the sun;
each green
plate of bark
captures
that watery sun,
filters it
to rainbow-drops of sap.
At the
base, the corky trunk hollows
to beetle
teeth, ant caves,
chickadee
nests, raccoon dens.
We sit on
this giant tree’s knees,
a living
bench covered by nutshells,
a gathering
of generations of squirrels.
Under us,
the sycamore’s roots explode,
a fireworks
booming slow,
a pulling
at the earth’s core.
High in the
top, from fingertips,
star-fragments
birth
into
pollen, then drift away.
Uncle
Bill’s Puzzles
1.
In his
shop, he jig saws
the outline
of Virginia,
tiny teeth
whirring through plywood
cutting the
path of the Potomac,
Byrd’s
surveyed straight edge,
the jagged
line of western mountains—
the traced
triangle
now a
silhouette in his hands.
Next the
counties fall away, fragments
of a whole
state, ninety chips of places
foreign to
his lumberyard hands.
With
tweezers, he holds each county,
paints it a
different color,
and waits
for dryness to print
Floyd,
Fluvanna, Caroline.
At
Christmas, he’ll gift me
his
newly-moved nephew
with this
map, and ask
“Where do
you live?”
2.
Uncle Bill
imagines a room large enough
to hold the
United States.
He dreams
this each evening
in his
cramped shop
where a
work light creates an island
around a
quiet man and a roaring saw.
New puzzles
of Maryland and West Virginia
would
nestle Virginia and Pennsylvania,
each new state,
a puzzle itself
of
counties, would become a piece
in this
country of growing puzzles.
People
would come to work
their home
states,
to hold
rough wooden edges
of mountain
and river and memory
before
starting on the next piece.
Witness
For Kevin and Melissa on their wedding.
“To feed
the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one
brief hour of madness and joy!”
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
What if we
lie on our backs
in the
dusky meadow
to watch
the last bats
slip
through winter’s grip
with
copper-colored backs
and wings
dancing
like
falling leaves?
Or if we
waited
all day by
the pond
for the
fleecy wood
ducklings
to fall
from their
nest, take
their first
swim to mother
waiting in
the cattails?
What if we
felt called
to search
for the peeper
and his
peep, never seeing
his
gold-ringed eyes,
only
tracing with our
ears the
bubbled throat,
the shrill
call of love?
What if we
did nothing
all day and
all night
but witness
this world’s
steady
unfolding?
We too
would bloom
like the
serviceberry
delicate
and white.
